


Great Gatsby-An Alternate Ending

by NotTotallyReal



Category: Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Genre: Alternate Ending, Author Is A Book Nerd, Character Death, Failed Marriage, I Tried Writing Like Fitzgerald, Murder, Nick's Point of View, didn't really work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-20
Updated: 2020-07-20
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:20:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25396792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NotTotallyReal/pseuds/NotTotallyReal
Summary: This is an alternate ending for the last few pages of the Great Gatsby. It is written from Nick's point of view. It starts after Gatsby takes the mattress outside.
Relationships: Daisy Buchanan/Jay Gatsby, Daisy Buchanan/Tom Buchanan, Jordan Baker/Nick Carraway, Nick Carraway/Jay Gatsby
Comments: 2
Kudos: 20





	Great Gatsby-An Alternate Ending

**Author's Note:**

> Please read, enjoy and maybe leave a Kudos or give me some feedback. Thank you and I hope you find some amazing fan fiction today!

Gatsby disappeared into the yellowing trees with the mattress, but he didn’t make it to the pool. Rather, he let it fall from his arms to balance half in and half out of his pool. He lit a cigarette, staring out into the Sound. What did he see in the distant reflection of the afternoon sun? What was he thinking as he steadily smoked a cigarette with firm fingers and a trembling heart? 

Gatsby was a man unsure of who he was, what he was, and where he was because he was unsure of what she had done and what she would do. His life was interwoven with hers, not like the graceful infinity of two swans entwining their necks, but like a creeping vine growing tighter and tighter around a slender white tree in its efforts to be ever closer. 

I saw him there from my backyard, looking just like he had when I had first seen him. Just like that night when he reached for the green light across the endless and untraversable water. But he wasn’t reaching now. He did not need to reach; he had already attained and lost her. 

I could not go to him; my feet would not let me. He was a man who needed to be alone, but I could not leave him. So I stayed with him, through his vigil of watching and waiting. 

He was a silhouette, but as the minutes and the sinking sun passed, his pink suit turned a darker, flaming pinkish-red in the beams of the setting sun that pushed through the trees. It was a sight I will never forget, the perfect righteousness of that man standing there. 

But then there was a movement and I saw a form amongst the trees. A man watching Gatsby, a man who looked like Wilson. He looked mad; shaking his head, stopping and turning back only to go forward again with a new determination in his step. He did not even try to hide, but instead strode forward with lanky strides, his greasy hair becoming tangled in the salty wind. He walked like a marked man intent on exacting revenge before he was gone. 

I tried to call out, to warn, but I could not. It was like something or someone would not let me interfere. So I stood there, a silent witness.

The man approached Gatsby cautiously from behind and for a moment, time halted its steady devouring of the world. They were silhouetted in the afternoon sun, one man a picture of casual rest and the other jerkily creeping like a diseased rat. But then Gatsby stiffened, like he heard footsteps in the wind and the autumn leaves beneath his feet. Wilson continued moving, then advanced faster, but before he got close enough, Gatsby whirled around. There was a moment of utter calm and silence like they were nothing but a drawing of two men that would stay motionless forever. 

But then Wilson’s hand jumped into his jacket and flung out again with a handgun. In a fluid movement Gatsby stepped towards him and then I could see almost nothing, just a black shape contorting. I could barely discern faint flashes of color from Gatsby’s suit against the grey outfit of his attacker. 

How Gatsby fought! Fought like a man who had just lost everything and wanted to redeem himself by losing himself in nothing but his animal instincts. In a few seconds that seemed like so much longer, a man dropped to the ground. I almost thought I could hear it in my feet, so close I felt I was to them. Gatsby stood for a moment over the unmoving heap at his feet, looking downwards with the gun insolently held in his fingers. He suddenly turned around, so quickly it only could have been instinct. As he turned, the gun he had taken from Wilson rose in his hands and went off. 

Gatsby howled, hoarsely, from deep in his throat, screaming into the setting sun and wailing into the whirling wind. A sound escaped from him that was not human, not animal, but something else. I involuntarily sprang back, stumbling to regain my balance. I saw Gatsby start to run forward but stumbled and tripped over the form at his feet. In a neverending second, he fell twisting through the air to the edge of his pool and hit the concrete with a crack I could hear like it had happened beside me.

As if it was the crack in the air to start a race, I was freed from my unwilling feet and unsteadily ran forward. I was too late, and Gatsby slid into the water, smoothly, on his blood. By the time I reached him, his torso floated in the water, the wound on the back of his head staining the water a pink to match his suit. His head gently floated a foot beneath the water's surface, his hair spreading outwards and softly waving. His features were frozen in a look of horror but his eyes were closed. It was as if he couldn’t bear to see what he had done, what he had destroyed. His legs were caught on the edge, an unseemly position not fitting for any man. 

When I finally turned my head to see what he had shot, there was nothing I could see but a crumpled heap of white, with a red stain seeping through to the grass. 

When the detective went to tell Tom a few hours later, he was lying face down on the sofa, a nearly empty bottle of scotch swinging gently and loosely from his hand. Like a pendulum, it swung forward and back until it stopped for an endless second and then crashed to the floor. Tom stared out the French doors, mumbling “She left...She left. She left!...She left.” Neither the police nor Tom knew what ¨She left¨ meant. Was he saying that she left him? Gatsby? This world? 

For months, Wilson lived in a stupified haze at the jail until his trial, where he was convicted of attempted murder and sentenced for six years. When he was released, he went immediately to his home and garage which had been left untouched by everyone and everything, out of respect, fear, or a mixture thereof. The once yellow building now loomed a cheerless gray in the ever dying light, matching the skin, personality, and man of George Wilson. 

He was never seen again, perhaps silently absorbed into the Valley of Ashes. Like a modern fairytale, he lay down in the hard grey dust in a grey abandoned road in a grey empty field and became grey dust resting on the grey ground. 

And I, I sought Jordan as soon as the police were gone and we fell into each other’s arms, clinging to each other like a drowning man to a barrel. In a few months we had our wedding, where Jordan wore her white dress like an empress and kissed me with her eyes half open. The bells tinkled a tune for our new life, and in the white decorations I saw endless colors illuminated in playful sun rays.

A few months later there were backs turned against each other, doors slamming and angry walks with cigarettes for company. When I saw that there was nothing to save, I retreated home to my family. I sought comfort in the gentle waves of wheat, in the simple happiness of seeing a loved one and in my family home filled with magical boyhood memories. But I found little comfort, as my time in the East had changed and corrupted me. 

My father was completely against divorce and would not hear of it. With bitter words rising in my throat, I returned East to Jordan. 

We parted ways, unofficially of course, just two lonely people no longer lonely together. I went West, seeking again the happier and simpler land of my childhood. Jordan stayed East to continue her golf career and to, no doubt, lie on many sofas, cynically smoking while some man gazed at her in awe and no small amount of trepidation. 

Tom was never the same. He shrank into himself, choosing to live in a world of half-remembered hazy moments and where he wandered the halls of his memory but never found the room with answers. He sent away his daughter as soon as appropriate, but it is said he refused to see her after that day. She grew into almost a spitting image of Daisy, so perhaps Tom was right in refusing to see her. 

He moved to the South Seas, visiting island after island chasing the moments when he could almost see Daisy barefoot beside him in the smoky dusk that turned into the dark tropical night.

Drowning himself in women and drink, he tried to buy a respite from his memories, but it was never enough. Dying from kidney failure some years later, in a gasping cry he spoke his final word- “Daisy!” before dropping back into grimy sheets where his hand lay grey and lifeless. 

And Gatsby was forgotten in a few short weeks until he was nothing but a brief anecdote told when passing his barren mansion. His funeral was as lifeless as his body resting six feet below in the finest mahogany coffin, but there were no tears shed upon its gleaming surface. Gatsby was all alone.

But he lived on in my mind, always standing in his yard, directly across from the Buchanan’s house. A silhouette in the light of the sun and a shadow under the glow of the moon, forever reaching.


End file.
